The Drop Review

A couple of years ago I reluctantly reviewed Bullhead, a Flemish-language film about abuses within the rural Belgian meat trade. I was surprised with what I saw, however. It was a nauseatingly brutal, engaging film, so violent in one part that I thought I was going to be sick. The director, Michael R. Roskam, must have impressed higher forces than me, because he was subsequently offered a big-hitting Hollywood crime drama with two huge stars. The result is The Drop, a New York underworld tale of money and murder.

The location is Brooklyn, in a run-down neighbourhood once run by Cousin Marv. The hulking bruiser of an American is played by James Gandolfini, of Sopranos fame, in what was his final film before a fatal heart attack. All the brooding, bastard thuggery that Gandolfini became so well known for is present in Marv. A decade earlier, some Chechen chaps muscled in, Marv ‘blinked first’, and the Eastern gangsters took over. Now he has to content himself with running a bar he once owned (originally called Cousin Marv’s), a location for criminals to store and collect their dirty money.

Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski, a taciturn relative of Marv’s who tends the bar and keeps out of trouble. However, trouble comes to him in two ways: first, when he finds an injured dog in a bin and forms a relationship with the owner of the bin, Nadia (Noomi Rapace). Her ex-boyfriend (played by Matthias Shoenaerts, start of Bullhead) is a lunatic with a violent past who then stalks and intimidates Bob. Second, the bar is held up by a couple of small time thugs, and the Chechens want their money back. The police also become interested. The various happenings threaten to take Bob down, but is there more to him than meets the eye?

As New York based gangster films are want to do, religious motifs pop up time and again. Bob and the detective investigating the shady goings on are both devotees of the local Catholic church. So enters the redemption theme. In the face of unrelenting criminality, Bob is obviously trying to do some good. His care for the dog allows him to put his religious sentiments into practice, for until now he did not even take communion.

It is also a film rampant in all-American masculinity - just look at the three top-billed actors and their reputations. It seems as if the gangster genre really is an update of the Western, and Hardy is every bit The Man With No Name.

The Drop stems from a short story by one Dennis Lehane, who then scripted the film. I can see how the story would work well in novella form or even as a brief play – it has the brief, intimate examination of a section of life that is perhaps too cosy for a big blockbuster. Considering the names at the top of the billing, the story isn’t as complex as presented. Pairing of actors to provide an unyielding masculinity to the gritty, Brooklyn scene.

Review: Fury

Fury is a tale of two halves. The first is a distressingly uncompromising, complex look at conflict. The second is an entertaining but empty Hollywood war flick.

Action man Brad Pitt is tank ace staff sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier, a grizzled veteran of the fighting in North Africa and Europe. In the first scene we see him brutally ambush a German soldier on horseback, stabbing him in the face or something equally distasteful. Then we see him tenderly pet the white horse, sending it on its way with affection. (Hitler was of course fond of animals but less keen on humans. I don’t know why maniacal nutters are often that way.) He commands the tank ‘Fury’, which has survived for so long partly due to Collier’s commanding skill and partly due to luck. He has thus far managed to uphold his promise to keep his crew safe.

The crew consists of chubby Mexican ‘Gordo’ (Michael Pena), hefty hillbilly ‘Coon-Ass’ (Jon Bernthal) and religious zealot ‘Bible’ (Shia LeBeouf). They’re equally jaded, oscillating between pious disgust at war and blood lust. When their gunner is killed (‘the best goddamn gunner in the Second Division’ or something like that), rooky army typist Norman (Logan Lerman) is sent as a replacement. As is imaginable, the battle-hardened crew give him a hard time, and Norman finds its difficult to shoot down Hitler Youth conscripts.

The environment that Fury creates is impressive. There is dirt everywhere – clothes, skin, ground, vehicles... they all have a pervasive mud and grime clinging to them. The soundtrack helps with the immersive feeling, not as in music but as in the sounds of war. There is an almost constant barrage of rumblings, gunfire, explosions and belching tank noise. In the tank itself we hear incessant clinking of metal, the tracks beneath whirring and the shells whizzing overhead. The screams and shouts of the crew just about cut through the ceaseless soundtrack of destruction: as a viewer, the feeling is one of submersion in total war, as much as that is possible in the safety of a cinema. The interior tank shots are plentiful enough to convey the claustrophobia and danger of tank warfare. If one of the objectives of Fury is to transport us into this type of enclosed, metallic combat, then Pitt and co. have succeeded magnificently.

The other thing that Fury does so well is to portray the complexities of war. Collier is not a righteous man: he shoots a prisoner of war where Tom Hanks’ officer protected one from mob justice in Saving Private Ryan. At yet at the same time he is fighting Nazism. At the heart of Fury is the examination of reality versus morality, ethics thought up in safety conflicting with the actuality of having to implement those ethics on the battlefield. What price is worth paying? To what degree can idealists keep their dignity and sense of right in the muddle of war? Fury’s war is not one of glory of righteousness, but child soldiers, murder and ceaseless slaughter. One particularly uncomfortable scene shows the horrors of wartime rape, with the audience having to see a post-battle town through the eyes of two terrified young women.

Filming and soundtrack aside, Fury brings war to life well by colouring its soldiers through superb acting. Pitt manages to portray the classic American army hero without resorting the simplicity: the nihilistic, brutalised soldier has clearly lost his soul somewhere back on the road. LeBeouf is often in the news for being a prat, but no one can deny his abilities. Bernthal really made me hate Coon-Ass in all his muscular chauvinism.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers decided that a spectacular final showdown was in order. When Fury is hit by a mine at an important crossroads, static and without working radio, the plucky Yanks find themselves in the path of an oncoming SS battalion. It’s always an SS battalion, as if an average army outfit would be too easy to defeat, and not nearly evil enough. Their last stand is hopelessly unrealistic, predictable down to the finest detail. The German soldiers are not skilled killers, masters of war who have honed their fighting abilities on the Eastern Front. Rather, they are clueless buffoons, running about with no sense of tactics. Only after dozens of them are killed does the camp, cowardly officer decide to abandon his policy of getting his men to charge straight at the armoured vehicle and instead crack out the anti-tank weapons. They are all hopeless shots, especially compared to the ace gunner Norman, who is now a skilful warrior, having been fighting for about two days. Hollywood often seems to forget that the Wehrmacht was an immense fighting machine, and unfortunately it took more than a few Brad Pitts to defeat it.

So Fury is doubtless highly gripping from start to finish, over two hours later. But the intelligent look at war in its muddled brutality, morality versus reality and man’s violent, nihilistic abilities is all in the first half; the second lets it down.